The other woman seated at her desk couldn’t move, transfixed by the sight of Sebastian and her coworker locked in an intimate embrace where no one else seemed to matter. His hand slid off the woman’s cheek. She sank back down to her chair, eyes wide, unseeing, lost in some fantasy of her own mind. Sebastian turned to the other woman. My heart raced as though I was witnessing something private and intimate. Something not for me. But I was rooted to the spot. I couldn’t move or leave or look away, even though I wanted to.
The younger woman surged to her feet as Sebastian came forward. He was taller than her by a head and so calm, so focused. When he reached out and trailed a finger down her jaw, she moaned as though she’d been dreaming of being touched like that her whole life. He whispered to her as well, and soon she was sitting in la-la land just like her coworker.
Sebastian faced me. My lips parted. Heat had spread in a slow, steady wave from the center of my torso outward. It felt claustrophobic, stifling. I cleared my throat. “Neat trick. What are you, some kind of hypnotist or something?”
His eyes held mine a second longer than necessary, and the warmth began to rise again. But then he rolled the younger woman away from the computer, faced her monitor, and began typing.
“Mother’s name?”
I went to the desk. “Eleni Selkirk.”
“Your date of birth?”
“June twenty-first, 2009.”
“Any birthmarks, defects? Caesarean or natural delivery?”
Yeah, one gigantic defect, I wanted to say. Instead I said, “None. And I don’t know about the other.”
He tapped the keyboard a few more times and then stood aside. “There it is. Selkirk baby. Female. Father unlisted.”
I scanned the monitor, already in denial. It couldn’t be. He had to be listed. But as I searched, there was nothing of use in the report, nothing I didn’t already know. “Nothing.”
Sebastian leaned down and selected the billing tab. “Let’s see who paid the bill. It’ll have insurance info and who else was on the card, if any.”
Okay, I should’ve thought of that, and having been given a second, I probably would have. The billing info loaded onto the screen. Insurance info. No one on the card except for Eleni. But the co-pay: “Josephine Arnaud. Who the hell is that?”
Sebastian straightened. His jaw tightened and his expression went grim. He dragged his fingers through his hair and then fixed me with a seriously pissed-off look. “Josephine Arnaud is my grandmother.”
The women started to move in their chairs, coming out of whatever trance Sebastian had put them in. He clicked back to the main screen, grabbed my arm, and propelled me out the door. “Come on, we’ll talk on the way.”
I was still trying to recover from the shock of what he’d said, and here he was shoving me toward the door before I could get my bearings. “Wait, hold on, on the way where?” We were through the door and out into the hallway. I jerked my arm from him. “Goddamn it, Sebastian! What the hell is going on?”
I knew I was being too loud, but at that point I didn’t give a crap who heard me. Sebastian ushered me into the nearest room. The morgue.
I stepped back from the door. “Well?”
“The Novem is made up of nine families—”
“Yeah, look, I don’t need a goddamn history lesson, all right? I know all about the nine families. Everybody does.”
Sebastian shook his head, annoyance flashing in his gray eyes. “Outsiders think they know everything. Josephine, my grandmother, is head of the Arnaud family. The Arnaud family is one of the nine who bought New Orleans thirteen years ago.”
A short laugh burst through my mouth. But he wasn’t laughing. He was deadly serious. “Your family. Your family owns part of New 2.” I paced in a small circle, giving another disbelieving laugh. “And your granny knew my mother and paid her doctor bills. This is unbelievable.” I turned my back on him and placed my hands on my hips. Anger coursed through my veins as my eyes slowly took in the sterile room—the exam table, the two carts with two bodies under blue cotton tarps set against a wall of small square doors that probably held more bodies. …
Seriously unbelievable. I spun back round, forcing myself to remain there. Putting your back to two dead bodies was definitely not something that felt anywhere near comforting.
I shook my head and cursed softly, not understanding any of it. My mother’s warning, the attack, the disappearing dead guy. The curse that now apparently extended to me, and now this—a head of the Novem actually paying my mother’s medical bills. Did they know about me, then? Is that why they wanted to see me? Had they been looking for me this whole time?
“So, what now? Go have a talk with dear old Grams? Ask her why she tried to have me killed?” I ran my hands down my face, shaking my head and denying this was all even happening.“Yeah, that was the plan. I think we should go talk to her.”
“Sure you do. That’s what you do, right? Do what they say.” I backed away, the rush of paranoia fueling my fear like lighter fluid on hot coals. “Thanks, but no thanks. I think this is where we part ways.”
I moved to the other side of the exam table, putting some distance between me and Sebastian. My hands curled around the cold edges, ready to shove it at him if he so much as twitched the wrong way.
One corner of his mouth lifted up slightly into what might’ve been a sad smile. “That would hardly stop me if I wanted to hurt you.”
I cast a quick glance over my shoulder, looking for another way out of the room. But there was none. Sebastian stood in front of the only exit. He regarded me patiently, like a parent waiting for a child to get over a fit, and it made me want to slap the look off his face.
“Ari,” he said finally, “Josephine Arnaud is a bitch and a manipulator, but she’s not a killer. The Novem doesn’t employ sword-wielding foreigners, and I’ll stake my life on that. If she knew your mother, then she probably has every answer you’ve ever wanted. I won’t let her or anyone else hurt you.”
“You don’t even know me! You don’t even want to know me, so why the hell are you going to protect me?”
He was quiet for a long moment, completely unreadable. His eyes darkened to steel gray. The muscle in his jaw ticked a few times before he said, “We’re the same. I know what it’s like—”
“Oh, please. You don’t know, okay? You don’t know anything. You have no idea what—”
“—it’s like to be different? A freak among freaks? Try me. You’re in New 2, Ari. Half the kids around here don’t even go to school. They have jobs. Jobs. The other half are Novem and more fucked up than you could ever imagine.”
So much of me wanted to meet his challenge, to tell him exactly how bizarre I really was, but I bit my tongue. It wasn’t worth it. And it wasn’t like he was going around telling me all about his weird-ass hypnotic abilities anyway. Why should I share mine?
“Whatever,” he finally said, and opened the door. “Do what you want.”
Screw him. He could leave if he wanted to. I was better off on my own. I’d always been better off on my own. This was New 2, the place for all things supernatural. If there was any way to learn more about my curse, it was here. I didn’t need Sebastian. Yeah, and your own mother lived here, yet she’d failed to lift the curse. I chewed softly on the inside of my cheek. It was still raw from where I’d bitten it before.
I let out a frustrated sigh as that realization sank in. “How much do you know about curses?”
Sebastian stilled. I knew what he was thinking, that he should just leave and be rid of me and my bad attitude, and maybe it was for the best.
He moved backward and closed the door, turning to face me. It didn’t take a genius to see he was pissed as hell. Just about as pissed as I was.
“Some,” he said. “Why?”
The letters went through my mind. My ancestors, all cursed to die at twenty-one. And though I wanted to, I couldn’t deny the truth. I knew it was real; I felt it. The dead guy, my hair, the letters. It was all real. “Because my family is cursed. I’m cursed. Not ‘cursed’ as in my life sucks or I’m different, but seriously cursed.” Yes, it was real, but it sure sounded like a bunch of baloney when said out loud. “Look, all I need is to be pointed in the right direction. I want this ‘thing’ gone, off me, whatever it is I need to do.”
The anger of before gave way to defeat and a whole lot of pessimism. My shoulders slumped, and I grew as cold as the corpses in the morgue.
“How about this?” Sebastian said. “I know a person who can lift curses. I’ll show you the way to the most powerful voodoo priest in New 2. And after that, you let me show you around the Vieux Carré. Then we’ll go together to quiz Josephine about your mother.”
I was pretty sure I knew what I looked like: a cartoon hamster in the headlights. Totally not what I expected him to say, especially after I’d just implied he was one of the bad guys. “Uh . . .” What the hell was I supposed to say to that? “Okay?”
A grin split Sebastian’s face, slicing two dimples into his cheeks.
Holy Mary Mother of God. I actually stopped breathing for a second.
“Good,” he said, still smiling. “Let’s get out of here. It’s freezing.”
Six
CRANK WAS RIGHT. THE NOVEM HAD CONCENTRATED MUCH, IF not all, of their effort and money on rebuilding the French Quarter, or the Vieux Carré, as Sebastian called it. As we ambled down Bourbon Street, every building had been restored, every windowpane, shutter, and iron railing refurbished. Even the sidewalks, which Sebastian told me were known as banquettes, ad been repaired. Like every postcard image I’d ever seen of the French Quarter, they left nothing out. The area thrived, too. This was their moneymaker. This was where the tourists came, where Mardi Gras still drew enormous crowds.
And Mardi Gras was in full swing, having begun on January 6. In a few weeks, it would end with the biggest parades and balls on the night before Fat Tuesday in February. In the meantime, there were balls every weekend, local parades, and vendors selling masks and costumes like crazy.